This report examines one promising approach: state and local partnerships with business and industry to train low-wage workers and help them advance.
For this analysis, we examined partnerships that: Involve an investment of public funds and are managed by a public sector institution (business and industry also typically invest in these partnerships); Give business a lead role in identifying job training needs and paths to job advancement, often for their own employees; Provide job training through public, non-profit, and for-profit institutions, sometimes at the worksite.
The majority of these workers appear to be stuck in low-wage jobs for long periods of time (Meyer and Cancian, 2000).
While many factors affect whether low-wage workers move up to better jobs over time, the two observable categories that appear to matter most are (1) the skills of the individual and (2) the characteristics of the employer.
The programs we observed tended to use indirect means of including low-wage workers in training, and to serve this population as part of a wider spectrum of workers.
Career Ladder Initiative program initially targeted a lowwage occupation that suffers from turnover and quality problems, Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs), for additional training and wage growth.
Instead, colleges may opt to create training on the more nimble non-credit side of their institutions.
In addition, for-credit certificate and degree programs often require that students have a high school diploma or GED as well as specific minimum scores on college readiness tests, which can be a barrier for some workers.
The Massachusetts Extended Care Career Ladder Initiative requires individual projects to engage the local WIBs---which have experience working with both businesses and training providers---to participate in the planning process and to help forge strong partnerships between these groups.
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